'Married Love,' by Tessa Hadley

FICTION

Heller McAlpin

Published 5:18 pm, Friday, December 28, 2012

Married Love

And Other Stories

By Tessa Hadley

(Harper Perennial; 205 pages; $14.99 paperback)

"I'm grey. ... My life's so grey," the headstrong young woman who ignored her family's objections and impulsively married her philandering music professor - a man old enough to be her grandfather - complains to her younger brother in the dispiriting title story of Tessa Hadley's new collection, "Married Love." Stuck at home with three small daughters born in rapid succession, her narrowly circumscribed life exemplifies dashed expectations.

In his recent Wall Street Journal review of Alice Munro's new short story collection, "Dear Life," critic Sam Sacks, while recognizing the "heft and seriousness" of her work, called the Canadian writer's underlying outlook "deeply, methodically bleak." British author Tessa Hadley, frequently compared to Munro, is not exactly uplifting either - but then, neither is Dostoyevsky. What Hadley's stories share with Munro's is an extraordinary ability to capture whole worlds - the hopes, disappointments, complexity and arc of characters' lives - in concise prose that never feels rushed.

Half of the dozen stories in "Married Love," including the title opener, were first published in the New Yorker. Despite that exposure, Hadley is better known in Britain than America. In her last novel, an elegantly crafted diptych called "The London Train," dual narrative strands both arrive at the same destination, where "love is a kind of comfortable pretense ... muffling everyone's separation from one another, which is absolute." That sense of alienation is not as pronounced in these stories. Yes, there's disillusionment aplenty, but also connections - between friends and siblings, especially.

Several stories focus on the drama that follows a major upset. "She's the One" grabs our attention with its no-nonsense opening line: "The winter after her brother killed himself ..." Out of solidarity, Ally moves back home after finishing college and takes an unsatisfying part-time administrative job at a nearby writers' center.

Hadley captures the isolating effects of tragedy: "All ordinary transactions were contaminated: 'How are you?' and 'How's it going?' and 'Nice day.' Even 'Bloody awful day,' which it usually was, would seem to imply an ordinary scale of gloom that her family was far removed from and couldn't possibly yet find a way back to."

The "yet" is important, and so is the fact that despite this bleak outlook - the "ordinary scale of gloom" of your typical bloody awful day - Ally finds unexpected reassurance from an intense, initially off-putting older woman she meets at the writers' center. This woman tells Ally about a trauma from her youth that she'd finally come to write about - only to discover that the story is dead to her. In other words, she's finally moved beyond it. The implication is that Ally, too, will eventually move past her brother's death.

One of the more ambitious stories, "Post Production," features allusions to both "Elective Affinities" and "Hamlet." Hadley opens with another arresting statement: "Albert Arno, the film director, dropped dead at his home in the middle of a sentence." He was also in the middle of making a movie based on Goethe's novel about the changing romantic affinities of four characters.

And who did Albert leave behind? Four people who, over the course of the story, change affinities: his oddly passive widow; his steadily reliable brother, who was his producer and business partner; a self-centered stepson who had hoped to benefit from Albert's connections; and "his indispensable editor, his partner in vision," a younger woman with whom, it turns out, Albert had slept. Where another writer might have played this for comedy, Hadley plays it straight, with somewhat mixed results.

Dread is another recurrent theme in Hadley's stories. Many of her characters, not surprisingly, are wired to expect the worst. In "Journey Home," a Scottish art historian visiting Venice notices on Facebook that his sister has broken up with her boyfriend. When he can't reach her, he fears that she has reprised the suicide attempt she made in her teens. In "Because the Night," a teenager who seeks refuge in an abandoned greenhouse during her parents' parties becomes convinced - and convinces the reader - that her mother's strange, lovesick former student is going to kill himself out there.

"In the Country," first published in Granta, is typical of the remarkable complexity Hadley manages to distill into her short stories. At a bucolic family gathering to celebrate her mother-in-law's 60th birthday, a young mother who "was afraid of how experience now seemed thin and used up, as if her children were the only real thing," is glad to be distracted from her "sour thoughts" by the "stronger force of pleasurable energy" emitted by her sister-in-law's latest boyfriend, the other outsider at the house party.

When she advises him to "always keep something of yourself back from them. Keep a few secrets," she could be reciting the declaration of independence that governs all of Hadley's characters. Despite hopeful flashes of connection, the sobering message of "Married Love" is that sustained intimacy is hard.

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